The regulars at PUAhate.com – we’ve met them before — are a strange and bitter bunch. Most seem to be self-loathing so-called “incels” who blame their lack of romantic and sexual success on their average or below-average looks. Rejecting the basic premise of the pickup artist crowd – that average guys can transform themselves into suave lotharios by mastering manipulative pickup formulas – the PUAhate regulars tend to be true believers in what they somewhat pretentiously call “looks theory,” the odd and obviously untrue notion that women only date men with “male model” looks.
As one PUAhater put it recently:
PUA makes you think that all your problems are because of your personality/behaviour – i.e. things you can control. So when you keep failing, it means that YOU are fucking up and doing things wrong
the reality is that many of us just lost the genetic lottery. we are ugly, the wrong race, the wrong height etc, and that fucked us up. there is NOTHING we can do about it
So, naturally, the PUAhaters spend a lot of their time jealous of tall, good-looking men for their supposed monopoly on the women of the world — whom they also hate.
But the strange thing is that the PUAhaters pretty much hate everyone else as well. They get angry when guys they consider ugly score “hot chicks.” They get angry when guys who are good-looking but not male models get attention from “really hot girls.” And so on, and so on, and so on.
Indeed, many of the regulars seem to walk around in a perpetual state of rage, angry at each and every man who’s managed to pair up with a woman, not to mention the women as well.
One regular recently described his “day from hell” to his comrades:
To start the day I saw a couple where it was an average White guy with an OBESE Asian girl. They were walking around acting like they were trying to prove shit. LMAO. I wanted to kick the guy in the fucking nuts for dating that landwhale. If you’re going to use the racial advantage, at least date a girl who is under 300lbs. Later I go to the gym and see the same tall guys I usually do. Even if I had a good face, how the fuck do you compete with guys who are fucking 6’4”?
Then at the gym there’s this good looking White guy there talking to this Asian dude about how Asian girls are easy and how they approach him. To make things worse after that these fucking frat douchebags come in with their girlfriends to show off . Then to cap off the day a girl I used to know from freshman year walks right past me without even saying anything. I used to fucking live next door to this bitch and now she doesn’t even say anything and acts like a pretentious cunt. She’s an Indian girl dating a White dude lmao. Days like today make you wonder why you even still try in the first place.
Of course, as I’ve mentioned before, most of those posting on PUAhate don’t actually seem to be ugly by anyone’s standards but their own, at least judging from the pictures of themselves they sometimes post to the site, which reveal them to be mostly average-looking guys, with some of the regulars even quite conventionally handsome.
But evidently they would rather believe that they have “lost the genetic lottery” rather than face a more obvious explanation for why the girls don’t like them: because they’re shallow, self-obsessed assholes who hate themselves and hate women and radiate their bitterness from every pore. (And some are even creepier than this, like this pedophile – sorry, ephebophile – who’s angry at me personally because unlike him I don’t chase after 15-year-olds. Link NSFW.)
The PUAhaters often talk about getting surgeries to “correct” their supposed genetic flaws. They would do far better to spend that money on therapy.
@timetravelingfool
Hah! Your old coach is seriously wrong. I have known women who could out-firefight 90% of the guys on the department. He wants to tell some of our most powerful firefighters to go home? He can go home. For seriously. Even the sexist dinosaurs in the fire service have figured out that women can fight fires.
And on the suggestion that you be a firefighter… the hardest part of the job isn’t the physical requirements, in my experience. Some days you drive up and people are dying and you get to be superman and save their lives. And that is the best feeling in the whole world. But some days you drive up and people are dying and there’s not a thing you can do and they die while you give them mouth-to-mouth. And that is the absolute worst feeling in the world.
There’s a serious emotional whiplash to it. But there’s an incredible need for firefighters. Everywhere I go we’re shorthanded, and every day people are in danger and need help. Day after day.
When I first joined I thought it was a small-town volunteer thing that would be like volunteering for the PTA or something. Put in a few years of effort, do the ‘community’ thing.
Instead it’s life or death stuff, all the time. It really recalibrated my sense of what’s important.
Regarding science fiction… Well, there’s the term “hard sci-fi” which I’ve heard applied to, for instance, the stuff my beloved Alistair Reynolds writes (okay, I don’t love EVERYTHING he writes, but quite a lot of it). The spaceships are much much faster than anything we have today, but they still can’t go faster than light, there’s no artificial gravity except what you can get by spinning or accelerating stuff, there’s no teleportation, no time-travel, but fancy biotech, fancy computers and cyborgs.
MOST stuff that go by the name sci-fi though basically just differs from what goes by the name fantasy by a) taking place in space and/or the future, rather than some vague medieval setting, and b) having different terminology.
That’s fine by me, though. I don’t put any particular significance in the word “science” in “science fiction”. Even if the term originally meant “fiction where the stories revolve around science” (hence the name), that’s not what it means any longer, and I’m okay with that.
I’ve been on a John Scalzi kick lately. There’s some hard sci-fi that’s fun. Charlie Stross.
But I also read fantasy novels with magic swords. So any combination of the two works for me too. 😀
To my mind the term Science Fiction can be applied to:
a) Anything set in the future
b) Anything featuring technology which doesn’t exist in reality
c) Anything set on another planet or in an alternate reality/universe
c) Anything featuring extra-terrestrials
So it can be pretty broad, but I like that. Science Fiction explores so many things, it’s why I love it as a genre.
I like Fantasy too, but I get so tired of all the Tolkein rip offs and a lot of the time I find them lacking in any real imagination.
A lot of the time you get books which are just a medievil-ish world with magic stuck in and they aren’t really doing anything new or exploring any new ideas.
I like books like the Abhorsen series or The Age of the Five as they’re actually trying something different with magic as a concept.
Yay I helped prolong the thread!
@Argenti: No, I haven’t read erfworld since it left the Giant site. I wasn’t all that caught by it in the first place, but I did find it amusing.
So I have a serious grouch and ulterior motives today. I went to the Godley thread and read for a while, but those videos gave me a serious skeeve, and the trolls who showed up there are tedious, so pleh, I’m coming back over here for my fun today. And waiting for the coffee to kick in so that I don’t rip the head off the next person who says hello to me.
@pecunium Ugh. Just ugh.
@freemage Poor Johann! My two are girls from the same litter. Evie is the quiet and serious one, who spends most of her time in the windows watching what’s going on, and yelling at the birds (she does that chittering thing, which is cute but in the wild I think that might get in the way of her hunting). She’s very prey-focused, though, and she will “stalk” the birds around the house constantly. Adora is, well, my lover girl. She’s kinda dumb, but very sweet and never seems happier than when she’s curled up on my lap. Teasing and attacking her sister is a close second, though.
@Gillian:
Coffee for the win.
I’ve had my four cups. I’m ready to be productive.
Oh yeah. There’s such a thing as coffee.
My world has become a fuzzy haze of bed-thoughts and diapers and paperwork.
Maybe I ought to start drinking coffee.
I’ve been grooving on Erfworld for awhile now, but yeah, this latest strip… Ow.
And at the same time as OotS new plot twist with Durkon?
Sci-fi: I’ve found two major axes (axises?) to judge sci-fi on:
Hard/Soft:
At one end, you’ve got stuff that’s arguably ‘just around the corner’. No violations of the deeper scientific laws (such as Thermodynamics and Relativity). Take current technology, and extrapolate. This isn’t as limiting as it might seem–fully functional AI, absolute genetic control–there’s a lot that can be done and explored within this framework.
At the other end of this, you’ve got sci-fantasy and space opera, where the trappings are changed, but have as much to do with science as Sauron’s Ring. This doesn’t make it bad, but it does mean you’ve moved beyond the point of having a story be about the science (and its ramifications) and on to stories about people (which, duh, is fine and dandy).
In-between, you get the ‘single break’ rule–where the fundamentals of science can be violated ONCE in the process of world-building. So you want FTL travel? Okay. Or you can have zero-point energy. Or time-travel. Or one other technology that current science tells us just can’t work. But then you stop and keep everything else within the bounds of hard sci-fi. This creates some really powerful speculative fiction, but it’s easy to break the rule and not even realize it, and thereby undermine your story’s ‘point’.
The other axis is Technophobic/Technophilic:
Technophobic Sci-fi assumes that technology always brings disaster and suffering. At best, human nature overcomes it; at worst, everyone dies. Dresden Codak’s “Cave-Man Science Fiction” is the best critique of this approach.
Technophilic Sci-fi, of course, tends to assume that no scientific advancement can ever be a bad thing, and it’s almost always a huge positive for society–at worst, some technologies need to be held off for a bit while we get ready to handle them. Star Trek takes this view.
@Howard Bannister Maybe this is OT, maybe it’s just maudlin, but I just wanted to take a moment to say thank you. A firefighter saved my life once. I was 9 or 10 and we had a fire that started because the chimney wasn’t as clean as it should have been and there were some sparks. The fire alarms went off and everyone got out and was standing on the lawn except for me, because the chimney wasn’t as clean as it should have been and there seems to have also been some carbon monoxide or smoke and I’d been allowed to sleep on the couch because I’d been home sick for the past day or two. I remember lying on the couch and dozing off when everyone went to the kitchen for dinner and then the next thing I know I was on the grass in the front yard with someone holding an oxygen mask to my face. I can still remember someone saying, “It’s okay, she’s coming around.” and then keeping me occupied while we waited for the ambulance so that I didn’t try to push the mask off.
So now, whenever I meet a firefighter, I tend to embarrass everyone by thanking them and making everyone have to listen to that story.
This past election cycle made me inarticulate with rage whenever I heard the ‘OMG cops and firefighters with their pensions and their retirement at 55’ meme, because I always wanted to beat them with the nearest heavy, preferably nail studded object and scream, “Do you not understand that these are the people who know exactly, precisely what the worst that can happen is and they run INTO the source of the danger anyway?!?!”
Urgh…
@kitteh I don’t have any pics uploaded at the moment, but I will be sure to share as soon as I do. Nubby is the handsomest cat, he is an orange tabby and his eye colour is the same as his light stripe
As per the e fiction discussion, as I understand it hard science fiction deals with the hard sciences (physics chem math etc) and soft science fiction deals with the ‘soft’ sciences (;sociolosgy psychology etc) I’mnot sure if those categories have even been relevant for a long time. I like the term speculative fiction because it encompasses all of the many variationsscscifi fantasy magic realismi;
Wow, wordpress on my phone is terrible. It kept randomly changing wherte I type and adding words :/
@freemage Nice breakdown. I like the focus on the rules, because for me that is always where the books I read (and I read a lot so I often pick up things that are marginal just to give them a try and to not be bored (I live in mortal terror of boredom #onlyslightlyhyberbolic). I’ll go with someone pretty far, even if they break pretty fundamental rules of reality, so long as the break happens at the event horizon of the story. I’ll accept zero point energy, or time travel, or somesuch to get into a story, but once I am there the world has to have internally consistent rules. When a book, or a movie, or a tv show breaks the internal rules with no logically consistent explanation for why it isn’t just “in the script” I tend to lose my patience.
For Nanowrimo I wrote a fantasy novel with a series of ascending twists where things get weird–y’know, if there’s wizards, WHY CAN’T THEY TIMETRAVEL levels of weird.
Trying to put in enough up-front lead-in that this didn’t feel like cheating without totally giving it away was HARD, y’all.
@Gillian: thanks. It’s nice to be remembered.
And, yeah, about the time Mitt Romney started on firefighters… well.
Can I borrow that heavy object when you’re done with it? 😀
I’ve been scribbling and scratching and doing research and making notecards for the last year on a novel that is rapidly approaching critical mass: that point at which it’s so close to assembled that it has developed a gravity field which will lock me into orbit around my laptop until it is written…
Maybe.
Okay, speaking of writing, I’ve got some to get done today. (Ugh how I LOATHE the first draft). So I leave you with this bit of spring inspired joy!
Cows going back out to pasture after a winter in the barn!
(that bit at 0:10, I swear my cats do that on the carpet all the time! Among other, less desirable things)
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ru2tWu1Xkzc&w=560&h=315]
Argenti: Pecunium — I know I said this last time I heard that story, but seriously, that’s some fucked up shit. Even accounting for racism I can’t work out the cop “logic” — I live with fucking conservatives and I can’t figure out wtf they were thinking.
I think it was a combination of disgust (he assumed I was bi-racial) and “Oh, there’s nothing to do, ‘those people’ just prey on each other/have no power’.
This was in a town which was moving from late early ’70s transistions (it was known as, “Billy Goat Acres” from the Okies who settled in the latter 30s). Prior to the War it was largely truck farms owned by Japanese: the Interment killed that, and made it pretty much white.
Come the early ’70s it became a first stop for Mexican immigrants, and the white population left/was displaced. Blacks were never much of a presence (the most recent census has all of 377 African Americans [the black population was in Compton, and that was colloquially known as, “Dogpatch” until the early ’70s: which is where my stepfather was from] in a population of 42,000. BY way of comparison, there are 40 same sex married/domestic partnerships in the town).
Compton was seen as a lawless place, and the cops in Bell Gardens (an independent municipality inside the City of Los Angeles, amidst a cluster of other small towns inside a big city) were all white, and I don’t think more than half a dozen were newer hires than 1975. They didn’t really like what they thought they saw. We also lived in the edge of town which was still mostly white.
This was about 1981-82. No one had been shot, in my part of town, in about three years, but it’s where I learned what gunfire sounded like. I recall a scout meeting which was interupted by a ‘thunk, rattle, spush’ as something hit the roof and rolled into the flower bed. It was a spent slug, .38/.357.
It’s where I got my sense of situtational awareness; and learned boxing, judo and street fighting. When I did the, “cholo-walk” in later years my knife fighting instructor was gobsmacked; because, apart from the fact that I am white, with red hair; and wasn’t wearing the right clothes, I was spot perfect, and it made him nervous.
So they saw a black guy, and assumed (I think) we were importing the criminal aspects they thought Compton had (and Compton did have crime) so they wrote it off as unsolvable (probably true, regardless) and not worth solving (not true). Stupidity like that is what entrenches the lawless, but I digress.
The world was different then. Thank goodness it’s getting better.
Re: sci fi
I like to go the Neal Stephenson route (see this video, iirc)and just put sci fi, fantasy, and historical fiction under the speculative fiction umbrella. Fewer fine lines to worry about!
Someone said something about hard vs soft sci fi being about hard science vs soft science. I don’t think that’s the way the terminology is used, but GOSH would I like to see more sf based in soft sciences! Hard science is great and all, but it ain’t really my thing.
Re:Dresden Codak
Squeeee!!!! He’s (one of) the closest things I have to a celebrity crush, even if I don’t really know what he looks like, and he’s not really a celebrity, and he only updates when the planets align.
(My other celebrity crush is Neal Stephenson)
Hard SF is used to mean, “I’m going to start with known state of the Art on Tech/Astronomy”
Soft means, “I’m going to have “techy-stuff”.
In a series (say Star Trek) the line seems to be, “We are going to have consistent limits to the tech”, vs. “Tech will be the Deus ex Machina we lean on to get out of plots we put into bad places”.
I care more about a series being “hard’ than I do a book.
Yeah, I remember reading something once breaking down the different Star Trek series by how they dealt with the availability of the transporter. Because once you have such a technology, you have to constantly be explaining to your audience why you can’t use it. I think Next Gen had accidents, Voyager had malfunctions and occasional weather conditions which wouldn’t permit transport, DS9 had technomumblty shielding systems and often lots of rock, Enterprise of course got in when the transporter was still new technology and was used only in extreme emergency situations (until the writers got lazy after the first season and started treating it pretty much like the rest of them).
Wish I could remember where that was (alas the Google is not strong with me today, heehee) because it was way funnier than the crummy summary I just gave it.
@Pecunium: I’ve read you tell that story before, and I don’t think I’ve ever said what awful people those cops were.
My childhood was rural; we couldn’t see our neighbor from our door, but only for the tobacco barn. I learned what a .22 rifle sounds like, and an air gun, when they are fired and when their bullet/pellet hits a target. I learned not to horse around with tractors and mowers, and developed a big fear of dog packs. My dad needed stitches after some structural rod in the bush mower fell into the spinning blades and got thrown every which way, including across the outer edge of his upper arm. I’ve never had to learn how to defend myself in hand to hand, which might be why I’m so blase about pretending to be some badass at the game table.
I never had to learn to fear cops. Even today, all I really worry about is getting pulled over.
I grew up with black kids in grade school, but few other groups. Hell, I don’t think anybody in my school ever identified as not-straight. If there was anybody who was not Christian, they kept their mouths shut, for the most part (I was pretty loud about it, myself; I think I know of a classmate who’s Jewish). In the early 90s, there was a small white flight from the city school I went to, to the county school.
I am also grateful that the world is getting better.
@Molly Moon: I really appreciate the art and the design on Dresden Codak. It’s accomplished and creative. But I don’t like the story, and I think it’s largely because of the way transhumanism plays into it. For some reason the idea that Kim is going to be some immortal god-mother to the human race doesn’t appeal.
Re: erfworld —
Howard, they switched to text during the week, comic on weekends towards the end of the summer.
Falconer, I kinda fell all brainiac for Jack. And thus stuck with it.
Freemage, he has the little X’s and everything! I have a hopeful theory though …
Bar bs gur puva’f tbg qrpelcgrq ohg gura ghearq onpx gb Wrgfgbar, tenagrq, ur qvqa’g ynfg ybat nsgre. Ohg znlor, whfg znlor, Jnaqn pna qrpelcg Wnpx ohg uvf yblnygl gb Cnefba jvyy unir uvz ghea onpx.
Be V’z fgvyy va qravny gung gurl’q ernyyl xvyy zl snibevgr znq unggre (lrf lrf, sbbynznapre, V xabj, ohg gung crefbanyvgl, gung ung = znq unggre). V unm n fnq!